Build Agents Your Way with Claude and Commerce Cloud

Anthropic recently launched a blueprint to help build commerce agents on Claude. This new starter kit for developers includes the reference code, guardrails, and best practices needed to build a shopping agent (to help customers browse, compare, and buy) and a merchant agent (to help retailers manage inventory, pricing, and promotions). This cuts weeks of engineering work down to days.

This is a serious step forward for the industry, and it tackles many gaps that merchants and shoppers have been asking about. The momentum is also great news for Commerce Cloud customers. Agentic commerce isn’t a future state anymore; it’s here, and it’s moving fast. We’ve been building toward this same vision, and we’re excited to see Anthropic validate the direction with the right capabilities:

• Merchants can easily expand into new agentic channels, using our turn-key catalog syndication for OpenAI and Google Gemini.
• A Shopper Agent on the storefront that offers a fully customizable, conversational interface to support not just product discovery, but complete end-to-end transactions.
• A Merchant Agent in the back office to surface insights, embed agentic actions, and assist with conversational task completion — fully supported by visual storefront preview and product curation.
• An open Commerce data model with the Commerce MCP server, so any AI application (including Claude) can connect to Commerce Cloud for product info, order data, environment configurations, and more.

Together, out-of-the-box agents from Commerce Cloud and Claude give merchants a strong foundation to build on, so you can spend less time stitching tools together and more time growing your business.

Claude’s Merchant Agent solves real pain; Commerce Cloud builds on that with a visual canvas and advanced agentic skills.

Merchants are overwhelmed by operational complexity. An AI agent capable of analyzing performance, identifying issues, and staging promotions is a warm welcome, especially right as the holiday preparation season begins for retailers. Merchant Agent for Claude offers much needed respite through data-driven insights, recommendations for next-best actions, and integrated workflows for catalog management, inventory, pricing, and campaign execution.  

AI-powered skills for merchants undoubtedly bring value. In fact, Commerce Cloud customers using our Merchant Agent are already seeing early success from pairing deep data analysis with proactive insights and built-in agentic actions. On average, this cuts time-to-task completion by over 86%. 

To accelerate the benefits, agentic merchandising relies on a multi-layered, enterprise-grade architecture that spans several key areas, including defining outcomes and strategy, mapping workflows, enforcing guardrails and compliance, curating assortment and auditing data integrity, as well as experimentation and attribution. These are the foundational pillars supporting the Commerce Cloud Merchant Agent. 

And we’re pushing these AI-driven skills even further. Merchandising work rarely happens in a single step. Merchants arrange, audit, compare, correct, and publish, often all in the same task, and that means they need more than just one way to interact with the agent. That’s why we pair a visual canvas with the agent itself. This means merchants can decide how they interact with the agent. They can direct it conversationally when the natural language interface is faster, or work with spatial precision when layout and detail matter (as they often do in merchandising). This flexibility also supports the kind of rich visual storytelling that’s core to how many brands show up on content-rich channels. 

Shopper Agents turn natural language conversations into sales, on your own storefront.

The best conversations are rich with context, accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. Those attributes also matter when it comes to chats between shoppers and AI agents. A natural-language interface to browse, compare, decide, and buy is only as good as the data behind it. Get that right, and it’s what converts browsers into buyers and keeps them coming back.

That’s what Shopper Agent on Salesforce B2C Commerce delivers, natively and out of the box. It guides a shopper from discovery through checkout, in the brand’s own voice, right on the brand’s storefront. Ask it whether trail shoes will make a Saturday flight, and it checks stock, shipping cutoffs, and pickup options, then completes the purchase in that same conversation — all backed by visual, on-brand product displays. And it’s already live: Cacau Show saw a 32% increase in conversion and a 50% increase in revenue after launching Shopper Agent on its site.

Maximize visibility on agentic channels, where high-intent product discovery begins.

Consumer use of agentic search as the first stop in the shopping journey grew 200% year-over-year and 90% of commerce leaders believe LLMs will be essential to product discovery by 2027. If discovery no longer starts on your own site, it’s crucial that your product assortment shows up on the channels where it does begin. 

Consumers are conversing in ChatGPT and asking Google AI Mode and Gemini to find, recommend, and compare products. If your product information doesn’t show up during those moments of intent, your brand essentially becomes invisible to the consumer. With out-of-the box integrations for ChatGPT and Google, Commerce Cloud customers can seamlessly syndicate products into respective channels.

MCP gives you the flexibility to build on your own terms.

Flexibility has always been a guiding principle for Commerce Cloud, starting with flexible storefront models and an open Commerce API layer. That same philosophy extends to how merchants can work with AI today.

B2C Commerce exposes an MCP to all merchants, so any agentic layer can access your commerce data within guardrails: catalog, inventory, pricing information, and more. This open model allows customers to use any surface of choice, such as Slack, Claude, or ChatGPT, as an intelligence layer. With our commerce data as a system of record, merchants can build their own agent interface. 

Commerce Cloud launched a Shopper Agent that converts, a Merchant Agent that works where merchandising actually happens, and we opened MCP so the model you choose (including Claude) can run on the same platform.

Success in the agentic era of commerce means flexibility. With Commerce Cloud, merchants have options: 

• Build it: Our catalog, cart, checkout, and merchant APIs are open via MCP. Build your own agent experience with Claude or any model you choose.
• Buy it: Commerce Cloud ships with Shopper Agent and Merchant Agent natively, out-of-the-box. Governed, embedded, and human-in-the-loop by design, it’s already driving measurable conversion lift for customers today.